Aymara's time metaphor reversed? Yahgan says....

[Mark P. Line]

D.L.Everett wrote:
> Very often when we theorize about the significance of this or that
> aspect of a given language, from time words to color words to
> phonological structure, etc. we ironically fail to address the
> problem linguistically, at least in the traditional sense of this
> term. Linguists look at components of languages and study their
> distribution within a given system, looking for contrast,
> complementation, and structure. They come to understand individual
> units of a given language by analyzing the components of those units
> (what they are or what they are composed of), what those units
> contrast with (that is, what they are not), and how those units
> interconnect with other units in the language or grammar to form the
> system as a whole, i.e. the entire grammar and cultural context of
> which they are a part. These latter three perspectives are what Pike
> called the 'particle, wave, and field' perspectives of language.


Holy cow, Dan, you didn't get the memo! That's not how linguistics is done
anymore. To see how it's _really_ done, google for 'maximum entropy' and
'latent semantic indexing'. I'm currently applying for a No Child Left
Behind grant to write a series of textbooks for high-school German based
on the new statistical paradigm. Schools will be able to demonstrate an
enormous improvement in German grades by using my textbooks, since the
kids will learn that

'Es ist uns wiederum gelungen, Bratkartoffeln in Spruehdosen herzustellen.'

can be translated correctly into English as

'Fry spray to make it on the other succeeded hand it us potato we in cans.'

as well as many other ways. Without the hypercritical assessment arising
from antequated structuralist bean counting, kids are free to produce any
translation that has the right statistical properties (p=0.35 for a
passing grade).

If you disagree, it's only because you're still thinking in that old
Pikean particle-wave-field paradigm and you're expecting to find
systematic, categorical relations in a language that can be used to
justify a translation into another language.


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX